Bringing you the latest old news of perforated interiors, we find this article from Cabinet magazine, Like a Hole in the Head.

Excerpts:

“Feilding wasn’t interested in performing the operation as an extreme form of body art, but because she believed it would have a life-changing effect on her. She hoped that a hole in her head would increase what she terms “cranial compliance,” that alleviating the pressure in her skull would allow the heart to pump more blood to her brain, thereby giving her a new feeling of buoyancy. “If you don’t have that expansibility,” she says of the prison of inflexible bone that most of us have for skulls, “then the heartbeat pushes against the brain cells, which isn’t very good.”

“Trepanation (from the Greek word trypanon, meaning “to bore”), the creation of a hole in the skull, is the oldest known surgical procedure. Perforated crania up to 8,000 years old have been found in prehistoric sites all over the world. Some of th­e holes, made by scraping away the bone with a flint or obsidian knife until a piece could be prised out, are the size of a man’s palm; other skulls have been pierced several times like a sieve. The majority of these apertures have soft edges, indicating that they had begun to heal and that there was a high post-operative survival rate.”

There is always this funny moment. I’m nodding along—yep, yep, we can’t reduce culture to discourse; there’s gesture, activity, materiality—when it dawns on me: oh right, they nevertheless still imagine that we are essentially heads with wavy arms.

Culture: what happens between the heads…

]]>http://splittingskulls.com/chrismoffett/the-space-between-heads/feed0Story Placehttp://splittingskulls.com/chrismoffett/story-place
http://splittingskulls.com/chrismoffett/story-place#commentsFri, 01 Jul 2011 20:11:47 +0000http://splittingskulls.com/?p=1149“Story time,” we call it, but it is just as much a place. We have places for our stories. Or is it stories for our places?

But isn’t this just another way of saying there is a time and a place for stories? And isn’t this just another, polite, way of saying there are times and places where stories do not belong?

One can find, (I can attest), in a building built to hold stories about buildings, a woman who will make a gesture of sealing her lips, but will decipher the code that will lead you to a separate area, “for new holding,” (no doubt the more recent stories must be acclimatized first), and there you will find a book on a shelf that begins:

The modern age has been an unkind chapter in the history of narrative architecture. In pre-secular times, it was not unusual for buildings to be constructed of and around narrative…

It will proceed to give examples before returning to the lament.

Today’s built environment presents such a poor receptacle for story that Arato Isozaki felt compelled to publish drawing of his Tsukuba Centre in Tokyo as ruins, immediately after its completion in 1983, in order to imbue it with a fictional life beyond the building’s conventional existence.

“Buildings these days…” the story goes. True enough. As a corrective, they will fabricate any number of stories to fill the void. Lovely, entertaining stories. Collages of fairytales and celebrities, renderings and cutouts, facts and fictions. Stories for places that lack stories of their own. You should glance through such a book, as I have. Perhaps even read it. (I might recommend it even more than that other book I never finish, Invisible Cities.) It is, in short, a book that should escape its shelf.

Odd, then, that it prefaces itself by fitting things back into their place, a book apparently for renderers:

The ultimate purpose of this book is to demonstrate that architectural representation need not be a neutral tool or mere picture of a future building, that drawing and models have a direct influence on the conceptual development of a project and the generation of form, and that there are alternatives to the reductive working methods of contemporary architectural practice.

Noble and welcome, yes. A breath of fresh air. But what of this story itself? The story architecture tells of finally escaping its confines and constraints, breaking free and tumbling finally back into a bed of meaningful tales? Could it be that this is the modern secular story? It’s as if we like to tell the story of the place of stories: they are either here or there. But what is difficult to glean then is that stories become what they are in the navigation through hostile space. The story is what survives by finding space, by making this space here and that space there. A story is just as much the story of what it is not. Gather close or you won’t be able to hear.

It makes me wonder, here in the basement of the building-built-to-hold-stories-of-buildings, whether we aren’t always creating the best possible environment for stories. And the best environment for the story of stories is a story-forsaken place.

The worth and marvel of a book might then be the ways in which it exceeds its own lament.

]]>http://splittingskulls.com/chrismoffett/story-place/feed1The Big Toehttp://splittingskulls.com/chrismoffett/the-big-toe
http://splittingskulls.com/chrismoffett/the-big-toe#respondWed, 25 May 2011 19:47:41 +0000http://splittingskulls.com/chrismoffett/the-big-toe
]]>http://splittingskulls.com/chrismoffett/the-big-toe/feed0Book Review: Urban Underworldshttp://splittingskulls.com/chrismoffett/book-review-urban-underworlds
http://splittingskulls.com/chrismoffett/book-review-urban-underworlds#commentsWed, 18 May 2011 14:33:06 +0000http://splittingskulls.com/?p=1114A review (by yours truly) of Thomas Heise’s book, Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture, has found its way to the online pages of the Teachers College Record.

I begin with a cheap ploy: “Urban Underworlds is a haunted book.” But as is fitting in tales of fallen spaces (which is to say, in yet another another cheap ploy) there’s a twist at the end…

Here’s an excerpt:

…if all too easily Urban Underworlds masquerades as a work of literary criticism notable for taking seriously the urban geographies that serve as backdrop, its deeper wager is that, in turn, we cannot understand the city without understanding the *fictional* force of the underworld. This means seeing not only the ways in which any number of salacious, even progressive, fictions can serve as a sleight of hand covering and justifying the urban shuntings of capitalism, but also the ways in which narratives can work from the bottom up, writing new forms into the text of the city itself.

]]>http://splittingskulls.com/chrismoffett/book-review-urban-underworlds/feed65The Death of Educationhttp://splittingskulls.com/chrismoffett/the-death-of-education
http://splittingskulls.com/chrismoffett/the-death-of-education#respondFri, 29 Oct 2010 13:55:13 +0000http://splittingskulls.com/chrismoffett/the-death-of-educationThe logical extension of my recent strategy of reviewing books I am still reading is to do so before I have even left the bookstore. In a way, then, it is only fitting that I am holding two books on death and burial. What could have more to do with beginnings and archives?

And with Halloween and Día de Los Muertos upon us too.

Sitting here, I recall, during this time of year, traversing a graveyard tucked precariously into the side of a cliff on the island of Janitzio, in Michoacán, Mexico. Gingerly stepping through the vaguely defined and flickering candle shadows of a patchwork of rocks, graves, dead-end pathways, food laid out on spreads of cloth, and seated families spending the night in vigil. They quietly and patiently marking with their bodies, and whatever they brought with them, the space for visiting with their dead, while being loomed over and encroached upon by the slow moving, packed tide of gingerly stepping tourists.

It occurred to me then that the day of the dead is really “the day of the living.” Teaming with awkward life.

Here then, in Saint Mark’s Bookshop, in NYC—sanctuary from the zombies and undead ballerinas churning on the street this Halloween weekend—I find myself holding two books.

Robert Pogue Harrison’s The Dominion of the Dead speaks to the way in which we engage in the burying of the dead to “humanize the lands where we build our present and imagine our future.” A question, then of beginnings. We should not be surprised, if we were to think about it, to find death, then, at the very site of education. Plato’s cave allegory, for instance, is a borrowing of older narratives of the underworld, as well as a forecasting of the modern classroom.

Education and death.

We prefer in education, of course, the abstract distance from our mortality that Plato offers up in the figure of Socrates. In Death and the Idea of Mexico, Claudio Lomnitz, in contrast, shows us the ways in which the imagery of death operates explicitly within the socio-political terrain of Mexico. Rather than showing the ever-presence of death to be pointed backwards to a past—or as a kind of “invented tradition,” good perhaps for selling a few sugar skulls, or an ethnological paternalism—Lomnitz instead shows ideas of death, as well as killing, as playing a formative role in the birth of the colonial state, of traditions of popular culture, and a sense of national identity. That is, death is generative.

Which is not to say simple. I think of the weird tension of the Danza de los Viejitos, the “dance of the old men,” particular to the area around Janitzio, and performed on the Day of the Dead. Young boys will dress up as the old, leading each other by their canes, perpetually quaking on the verge of collapse, until, just when the fall seems inevitable, it breaks into a tap dance of wild and athletic abandon. Perhaps originally a pre-Hispanic dance to the sun—which should make us think immediately of the complicated tension the sun has with it’s own absence, and with death—then somehow reinterpreted within the Christian narrative, it is now something of a comedy. A tradition of tradition mockery—performed by the young mocking the old “meaningless” dances of the elderly, they are frenetic pastiches of dance and tradition. And yet this too becomes a tradition. What then is death if not this constant deferral of collapse, of the oscillation between tradition, rejuvenation and irreverence? Birth and Death. Memory and Forgetting. Gift and mockery.

I wonder, in another context, what we are learning about ourselves through dying our ritualized educational deaths? That is, in the deaths that we seem to enact within education, in both ritualized and real sacrifices, but also in our ongoing narrative about the potential demise of education itself. Always on the verge of collapse. Danza de los Viejitos.

And what,are we to do, here in the US, with the death of death itself? The way, despite it permeating our educational traditions and discourses, we prefer to hide it from view altogether?

]]>http://splittingskulls.com/chrismoffett/the-death-of-education/feed0Mediumism: The Art of Educationhttp://splittingskulls.com/chrismoffett/mediumism-the-art-of-education
http://splittingskulls.com/chrismoffett/mediumism-the-art-of-education#commentsThu, 23 Sep 2010 12:01:46 +0000http://splittingskulls.com/?p=519As someone who takes the aesthetics of education seriously, I was pleased to be asked to respond to René Arcilla’s new book, Mediumism. The Panel is this evening, and should prove interesting. In part because Arcilla confounds the line concerning aesthetics and education. If Art Education, at first glance, is simply about the teaching of art, Arcilla suggests that art, in turn, may have much to teach us, and about teaching.

His argument, in a nutshell, is that the Modernist movement can serve as an exemplary model for educational thought, in part because of the way in which it challenges and subverts our easy aesthetic interpretations by highlighting its own medium. Hence the title of the book.

Having taught future art educators, I have been witness to their uneasiness with their profession: feeling called by the disruptive power of expressiveness—even beauty still—that they have found in art, but challenged to think what this might mean translated into the educational domain. Lesson plans and classroom management.

What we wound up exploring together was the ways in which our vision of education is itself already aesthetic. Art is not merely a beleaguered backroom of education, one neglected subject amongst many others. It is instead possible to imagine that education itself is a particular artistic problem.

That is, if teaching is an art, it is so not in the facile sense that we can throw the term around, but as a deeply challenging area in which we struggle to express something perhaps always beyond our grasp.

Art struggles with its own meaning, always in danger of having too much in addition to too little. This is the difficulty Arcilla suggests Modernism rises too: Kitsch. And as in art, so in education: we run the risk of kitsch. The repetitions themselves drive us to triteness. Education’s Velvet Elvises.

(Er… Elvi? Elvisēs? Is this not the problem of replicating the singular? The eerie creepiness of seeing too many Santa’s? Move right along…)

Arcilla challenges us to imagine the troubling force of modernist art, its anti-kitsch. Liberal education does not merely steer us to our freedom, but has the potential to highlight the ineffability of this freedom itself. We do not learn to be free, but instead are pushed to learn what it means that we are already free. And even further, beneath our freedom, we are confronted with the the puzzling fact of our own existence.

And it is to this, that education, as Mediumism, might drive us. So why do I find myself frustrated with the project, as sympathetic as I should be, and struggling to put my finger on from whence the unease comes? As it so turns out, I have also been reading Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor’s book, On Kindness. And I came across this passage:

The modern Western adult’s fear about himself is that, to put it as crudely as possible, his hatred is stronger that his love; that there is, in the British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones’s words, “much less love in the world than there appears to be.” Our kindness is chronically in doubt (and not, as philosophical skeptics have traditionally tried to persuade us, our existence.) Childhood has become the last bastion of kindness, the last place where we may find more love in the world than there appears to be.

And it struck me that there was much more, for us moderns, to work out in the relationship between art and education. And that freedom and existence, like “knowledge” or “beauty”, while part of the canvas, might distract us from the challenge of kindness. Of what it means to, in no easy way, be together. This is the deep perplexity that runs quietly through Mediumism: are you with me, and on what terms?

Is this not the challenge the new art teacher feels most acutely? Called to the last bastion of kindness, childhood, do they not worry that they won’t be loved, perhaps thrusting the notion that it is art that is not properly loved like a shield and a mission in front of them. Worse would be the horror if they were to find that they themselves possess much less love than appears to be.

Arcilla is right, then, to challenge and invite us to rethink education. And what if the medium of education, its difficult currency, is not merely existential, but the mixed media of love and hatred?

Would we not have much too learn?

]]>http://splittingskulls.com/chrismoffett/mediumism-the-art-of-education/feed27Inheriting the Rubble – Eugenics and Behaviorhttp://splittingskulls.com/chrismoffett/inheriting-the-rubble
http://splittingskulls.com/chrismoffett/inheriting-the-rubble#commentsMon, 05 Jul 2010 14:22:23 +0000http://splittingskulls.com/?p=393As a radical agnostic (sorry, can you repeat the question?) named “Christopher” (φέρω, pherō: to carry. You work it out….) I only have sympathy for those named “Eugene”. Lord help them if it’s meant specifically, these are our “good genes”, or wishfully, here’s to the utopian promise of good genes, or somehow both.

We seem to have inoculated ourselves well against the history, imagining it went under with the Nazi’s and never-mind where they got it from. Nowadays we speak in post-social code: stem-cells and health modification. Meanwhile the behaviorists countered the naturalists, taking over the discourse of schools. We are all blank slates of culture. Now let’s behave already.

But we learn hard. Isn’t the larger challenge that we are a sucker for the dichotomies, but don’t like to dig too deep.

As Weiner points out, traumatized physicists, after the Manhattan Project, turned to biology for solace, “as if they were turning from sin to virtue, from darkness to light.”

“In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no over-statement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin,” Robert Oppenheimer said after the war…. But biologists had lost their innocence long before the war. The study of genes and behavior was born in sin, and the possibility of sin would cling to it.

We prefer to miss the deeper narratives that drive us, imagining we can just change the subject. But doesn’t it run deeply through our dreams? Light and dark.

Thus the backlash of utopia through good genes, turns into behaviorism, utopia through environmental control. We think we can leave behind the common denominator.

It hardly takes much. We even pride ourselves on our caution, our level headed good-will. Weiner captures the absurdity of Francis Galton, the grandfather, so to speak, of Eugenics:

We must free our minds of a great deal of prejudice before we can rightly judge of the direction in which different races need to be improved,” [Galton] wrote in the opening pages of his Inquiry into Human Faculty in 1883; but having said that, he felt “justified in roundly asserting that the natural characteristics of every human race admit of large improvement in many directions easy to specify.” Everyone knew, for instance, that women are “capricious and coy”—airheads. Everyone knew that Jews are double-dealing misers. And so on.

Stunning. But surely the shift to the blank slate of behavior leaves all of that behind, like physicists moving on to the study of fruit flies.

It’s not our genes, but our environments that code our dystopia, counter the culturalists. But does this keep it from being the same story, the displacement of race onto place? “Place-ism” you might say. “Urban Education” is a typical euphemism, used by right and left.

Galton established the link, at least metaphorically. Weiner writes: “He thought the construction of our bodies and minds must be like the construction of houses he had seen in Italy, many of which are built from the pieces of older houses that had been pillaged or torn down.” In Galton’s own words:

Suppose we were building a house with second-hand materials carted from a dealer’s yard. We should often find considerable portions of the same old houses to be still grouped together. Materials derived from various structures might have been moved and much shuffled together in the yard, yet pieces from the same source would frequently remain in juxtaposition and may be entangled. They would lie side by side ready to be carted aways at the same time and to be re-erected together anew. So in the process of transmission by inheritance, elements derived from the same ancestor are apt to appear in large groups, just as if they had clung together in the pre-embryonic stage, as perhaps they did.

Would this not explain his own failure to leave behind his own biases and racisms? The wiping aside, itself becomes part of the process, allowing us to think things are fresh, sins absolved.

Is this not the lesson from Descartes? After the process of radical doubt, in which everything is brought down to the bedrock, we find a rapid re-development in which, as has often been noted, whole chunks of the rubble seem to remain intact. Both genetics and behaviorism escape the dilemma by focusing on the elemental particles themselves. But in a way this was Descartes’ strategy as well. Dreaming of razing the messy cities of Europe to the ground to build them on solid foundations, and proper grids, Descartes restricted himself to the elemental particle, himself. The mind as synecdochal city. The city, as stand in for the inhabitants. Philosophy, the secret razing.

Education: the domain having to do with the relationship between interior and exterior. The dream: that things will be carried over well.

]]>http://splittingskulls.com/chrismoffett/inheriting-the-rubble/feed34“There is no book…”http://splittingskulls.com/chrismoffett/there-is-no-book
http://splittingskulls.com/chrismoffett/there-is-no-book#commentsFri, 11 Jun 2010 20:59:39 +0000http://splittingskulls.com/?p=179Reading Sacrifice: It’s Nature and Function, leaves me wondering about all of our daily investitures. It concludes by pointing to the complex ways in which sacrificial rituals function within our personal and social spheres, even, and especially when they are abstracted. But why? Why sacrifice?

Their answer is that the mediation of the sacrificial object or victim allows for relations between entities that otherwise could only come together dangerously. The god’s are fatal to mere mortals.

Could it be that “the book” is one of the sacred objects we invest in order to mediate our relationship to the educational gods? Nothing could be more fatal than an education actually received in full.

As I continue my new ritual of reviewing books that I have not yet finished—undermining, as it were, the sacralization process, setting it in motion down different lines—it strikes me that there are no books as such. Just as Heraclitus argues that one can never step in the same river twice, since the moment is always swept away in the current, one might say that a “book” is a creature of the moment.

At the very least, a book changes in relationship to the books being read (and not read) around it. Since I can never seem to read one book at a time, the art of reading begins to be less about a kind of fidelity to the text, and more an art of collage, in which new books are created (and destroyed, “sacrificed” perhaps) from the bookish elements lying at hand.

I can particularly recommend reading Sacrifice in the vicinity of Ernesto Laclau’s On Populist Reason.Living, as we do, in a time where sacrifice appears to have refined itself into abstraction, receding from center stage, we have to ask to what extent its logic and operations are still relevant, and Laclau is particularly fruitful in this enterprise.

If we think of the ways in which Hubert and Mauss show that sacrifice is a complex negotiation of sacred valuation, in which value is passed around, often in diffuse, layered, or sequential strategies, the question that haunts me is the underlying drive. What is it that we are up to?

While not necessarily answering this question head on, Laclau points to the difficult social tension:

…the only possibility of having a true outside [to define the boundaries of our whole] would be that the outside is not simply one more, neutral element but an excluded one, something that the totality expels from itself in order to constitute itself (to give a political example: it is through the demonization of a section of the population that a society reaches a sense of its own cohesion). (70)

And further on down the page, we find the difficulty of this tension between the needs of both cohesion and difference:

What we have, ultimately, is a failed totality, the place of an irretrievable fullness. This totality is an object which is both impossible and necessary.

If we return to sacrifice, this resonates with one of the great oddities of the sacrificial rituals: the more effective they are, the more they repeat themselves. Either the victim is shown to live on, or the story must be retold without end. It is not simply the cycles of the agrarian harvest (still represented in our school calendar) that drive the repetition but this impossible necessity. The sacrifice is never over.

We could take this insight in any number of different directions, but let’s come full circle back to books, or rather to a particular example of the drive towards totalizing cohesion: the Western Canon.

Here we could imagine the ritual of lists serving to determine a social cohesion by investing objects with a sacred force. These are what bring us close to the gods. This is who we are. But if that is the case, how do we sacrifice them? To be sure, book-burning and censorship represent the opposite, excluded pole. The anti-canon, as it were. But such overt violence to books, in this day and age, is deemed uncivilized. We must imagine a more sophisticated kind of sacrifice. Perhaps they are sacrificed by reading itself. The consuming of books. This might account, in part, for the call for fidelity to the completion of the text: let us use every part of the animal, a complete transmutation. Also, repetition and saturation: these are the books everyone should return to.

But what if it involves a kind of unreading as well? These are the books you can never approach. We will read them for you. Or, hand in hand with repetition: these are the books, that even when read, are not read, and cannot be fully grasped, always exceeding any reading. Or more mundanely, these are the books that, because you are supposed to read them, are ensured to be both traditional and inconsumable—like fruitcake during the holidays.

What if War and Peace—representing more than anything impossible fortitude of reading—in being finished, is paradoxically a testament to it’s impossibility? It can be completed but never read.

Hubert and Mauss, after sketching out the general schema of sacrifice, point out that this can be combined in any number of different ways to effect different functions. They walk through several, and rather than try to bridge these to educational strategies, I will just leave them to tantalize a bit.

Sacralization: sacrifice in which the sacrifier (the vested interest, as it were, of the sacrifice), does not initially have sacred status. The sacrifice is thus designed to invest or impart the sacred to them. Initiation and ordination. Here the “ceremonies of introduction are necessarily very much elaborated” but closure is reduced or may even disappear entirely.

Expiation: here the sacrifier already has a sacred character, but has developed “impurities” that must be expelled. “The sinner, just like the criminal, is a sacred being.” In this case, the sacred is passed not from victim to sacrifier, but from sacrifier to victim, and thus expelled. Demons begone! The site is often on the periphery, and the emphasis is on rites of exit and closure.

Desacralization: Actually the above example is the negative pole of a larger function that can apply just as well to the problem of too much Mojo. (That’s a technical term.) “Things, like persons, may be in a state of such great sanctity that because of it they become unusable and dangerous.” Thus sacrifice becomes sort of a sacred release valve to blow off excess pressure.

The chapter mysteriously ends there, pointing to the complex nature of these workings and how they can be combined in any number of forms. We are left, it seems, to ourselves to figure out any number of other possible combinations. (Although the next chapter, “How the Scheme Varies According to the Special Functions of the Sacrifice,” appears promising.)

For now, though, the question would be: can we imagine where these functions show up in the rituals of education? And what further combinations might we add?